The Labyrinth
by Long Xian-Ha
Summary: I was fascinated by the character Astaroth in the manga Angel Sanctuary. This is a look at him through the eyes of a young OMC. There's more to it than that, including weaving of themes and a LOT of angst. Chapter 1 is just the main char's intro. A lo
1. Explication 1: Crown of Stars

LABYRINTH  
  
  
  
Explication:  
  
Part One: Crown of Stars  
  
Starry starry night  
  
Paint your palette blue and grey  
  
Look out on a summer's day  
  
With eyes that know the darkness in my heart…  
  
Don McLean, Vincent  
  
  
  
The stars embodied a cold thesis: that self-awareness, such as it is, is a pathetic joke. The vaulted ceiling of the sky leered down. Clouded midnight blue blurred the white torches of stars, distant enough to seem pinpricks of icy light against the velvet backdrop of night. Far away, streetlamps echoed with a bleary amber artificial light, spilling broken circles of luminance downward over litter-pocked grey sidewalks. Somewhere, farther distant, the stars reflected off the many glass panes of windows in some high rise, and farther still, a siren wove its eerie howl through the emptiness. The emptiness of what Eliot might have called 'Unreal City'.  
  
Vincent shivered. The memory of the dream was still fresh in his mind, and although the night was too cold for standing on his balcony in only a thin hotel robe, he knew he was shivering because of the dream, and not the frozen air of late winter. The dream was always the same, pale champagne eyes seen through a halo of blood. And then the silhouette of a man with long hair of a red that could never occur in nature, red of brick, red of blood. Long enough to brush the floor and pool there. That is all he could see- he could see no face. Every time he had that dream, the man was about to turn, and then he was filled with such an intense fear he couldn't breathe, and he woke up.  
  
His hands looked pale and thin against the white wood hotel balcony. The black diamond on his left pinky flashed as he moved his hand, sliding it into his hair where it could be warmed- startling and sort of unpleasant against the hot skin on the nape of his neck.  
  
With a sigh, Vincent turned and stepped barefoot back into the suite, sliding closed the cold glass door behind him. He left the filmy white weave hotel curtains open, wandering aimlessly through the room, glancing at the lines of numbers printed on the white phone, lines of letters printed out on the hotel notepad. In this state of mind he could hardly connect letters into words he had written by hand.  
  
Who was that man? Why did he seem so familiar?  
  
The phone rang. He leaned his hips on the side of the too-soft mattress, plucked the phone off the hook. His voice was soft, un-accented, though he was not an American. "Yeah?"  
  
"Vincent. There are some problems with the shipment." The voice of his operations coordinator on the other side of the line was tense with fear. Why, because of some minor problems with the shipment? Vincent was enough of a patient man to deal with minor setbacks, and enough of a businessman to know when to cut his losses. Perhaps that last was what Albrecht was so afraid of- as outlined ironically in Machiavelli's work 'The Prince,' cutting ones losses often includes good riddance of bad operatives.  
  
"What kind of problems?" He asked, shifting his grip on the phone to flip through the names on that hotel pad. All in code, which in his present state took a few seconds to translate. Albrecht's name was not on the list.  
  
"Delivery problems. What Nelson sent us isn't pure."  
  
Vincent's first reaction was intense anger, which slid up out of the bottom of his belly and slowly traced its way through his veins like burning lava. He forced himself to be philosophical about it, however. After all, when one was new in any business people always tried to cheat you and screw you over. He sighed deeply, theatrically, into the receiver, and then said calmly, "You deal with the shipment. Salvage as much as you can. I will have a little talk with N-"  
  
His sentence was cut off abruptly, never to be completed, as several things happened in tandem. Vincent felt a tearing, ripping pain in his stomach and doubled over, vision going nearly white with intense vertigo. All the lights in the hotel room went out. Total blackness swept over everything, only slowly overtaken by the moonlight streaming in through the glass sliding doors. Cursing, Vincent stood up as best he could and staggered around the growing outlines of the room's landmarks, staring up at the sky. Looking out over the city, he saw with deepening shock that the entire city was dark. No cars moved. Even the flashing videoscreens on the downtown buildings were totally blank. It was eerie, as if life had fled the entire world.  
  
Vincent went back over to the bed, sat down carefully and lifted the phone receiver. It was dead. Totally dead. He tried to contact the desk, and failed to even get that. There was no tone at all.  
  
He went to the door. Fumbling open the deadlock, he turned the knob, staggering into a hallway that was almost complete darkness. He could see absolutely nothing. Fear leapt into his stomach and squeezed with cold, brutal fingers. He pressed his own hand against the curiously fabric-like feel of the wallpaper, trailing fingers over it to guide him as he walked. Several times he staggered and had to alter his pace as he past the little niches holding pairs of hotel room doors. Once, he slammed forcefully into a human body.  
  
His curses turned quickly to apologies. There was no answer. In fact, the body he had hit thunked to the floor like so much meat. Vincent cursed violently and reached down to help this poor person up, only to feel limbs as stiff and unmovable as iron. Fingers searching rapidly in the darkness found no pulse. Dead.  
  
His eyes widened, and with an animalistic urge, he scooted back along the carpet. The hallway's worn rug burned his bare skin, but didn't stop till his back hit the wall. He fumbled for a weapon, a dropped flashlight, something heavy in a fallen purse, anything at all. He came up empty, cursed again mentally, unwilling now to make a sound. Then he widened his eyes as if that would help him see in this terrible darkness.  
  
A thought leapt into his head: All life had left this world! He was the only living, moving thing!  
  
But he had scarcely entertained that thought when it was belied. There was a soft, slow tread of footfalls approaching him from the end of the hall.  
  
"Who are you? What's going on?" His own voice sounded thin and lonely in the huge, still darkness. Until it was joined by a low, androgynous chuckle.  
  
There was a flash, and color appeared- red. After a moment Vincent's eyes registered a lit match. Behind it he could see a slender body clothed in black, a face painted with clown makeup, and a tangle of brilliantly red hair caught up under a broad-brimmed black hat. In his hand was a bunch of flowers… or was it her hand?  
  
"What are you supposed to be?" He asked, feigning boredom. Things were getting, as Alice might have said, curiouser and curiouser.  
  
As if the thought of Alice had imprinted on this odd, unreal reality, the figure illumined in the bare ruddy glow of the match lifted his (her?) hand to tip that hat. "One is called Mad Hatter. You are a strange fish, aren't you? I thought all motion on earth had been arrested."  
  
"All motion on…?" Vincent's eyes widened again. "That's ridiculous! Life would end. The world's orbit would shift, we'd either spin off into the sun, or so far away we'd cover in ice."  
  
"You think you know so much about the universe…" She tsked lightly. Something about her manner of conversation convinced him that was the correct gender to use. He was almost sure, anyway. "But one must confess one was speaking of the entire universe, and not simply your planet earth."  
  
"The… entire…?" He croaked. That seemed to amuse her. Black painted lips curved a little. The match she was holding was a long one, of the kind that he remembered seeing in long, gold-papered boxes and had never quite known the use. Nevertheless, it was nearly burned out.  
  
In its fading light the Mad Hatter pointed down the hallway, and Vincent was startled to see a flash of white motion, low to the ground. "Follow the White Rabbit." She advised, before smiling wickedly and blowing out the match.  
  
"Wait! Mad Hatter! Without the light, how can I-?" He fumbled to his feet and stumbled down the corridor after her, but she was gone as if she had never been. Perhaps she had never been. Maybe this entire thing was only a dream, or a hallucination provided by his broken, severely diseased mind.  
  
He stared into the darkness ahead of him. Follow the White Rabbit.  
  
"Well, for lack of a better idea," Vincent muttered, and strode along the hallway, hands held out in front of him, feeling for obstacles.  
  
What he met was the smooth, mirror reflection of the closed elevator doors. Sliding his hands over the walls nearby, he finally contacted the elevator button, and pushed it harder and harder, again and again, until he realized it was not going to work.  
  
Cursing again, Vincent fell with both hands flat against the cold metal, banging his forehead against it perhaps a little too hard. And then… he had the sensation of falling.  
  
Falling through metal? Surely not! But nonetheless he was falling, falling down the elevator shaft… down the Rabbit Hole… and the darkness twisting around him, absent of any lights or colors, only added to his fear and disorientation.  
  
A scream tore out of him once as he fell, a scream that seemed endless. Then he screamed once more as his body slammed against stone.  
  
Because it damn well hurt. But as he began to move, gathering himself together, he realized that beyond all hope, nothing seemed broken. And there was light here. As he sat up slowly, wincing at countless bruises that throbbed over his skin, he saw that he was in a circular stone chamber, with three archways leading off from it. The light seemed to be coming from the two to his left.  
  
Vincent got to his feet slowly.  
  
"Hello?" He called. His voice echoed off smooth stone.  
  
"Hello?" He repeated, and once again was answered only by his echo.  
  
With a sigh, Vincent hobbled over stone toward the two lighted corridors. He realized he was still barefoot and excruciatingly cold, wearing nothing but that damned hotel robe! That brought a whole string of curses, which, amusingly enough, echoed as well.  
  
Eenie meenie chili beanie.  
  
Vincent chose a path at random, and continued to wander until his feet felt swollen. To add insult to injury, a dark pit appeared like some demon's maw in front of him and he had to stop. Stopping meant cold though, and he curled into a ball, clenching his fists tightly and trying not to despair.  
  
"I will not give up," he told himself. "I'd be certain this is a dream except for the cold and pain sensations. If it is a dream, I can control it if I refuse to play by the rules."  
  
He got up, winced again. "And if it isn't…" he muttered to himself, "I know I can control it if I bend the rules."  
  
Oh please, Brer Fox, please don't throw me over that cliff.  
  
Instead of choosing the labyrinth of doors and arches that surrounded him, he took a deep breath and leapt into the pit.  
  
  
  
Explication:  
  
Part Two: The Color of Blood  
  
Trapped in purgatory  
  
A lifeless object, alive  
  
Awaiting reprisal  
  
Death will be their acquisition  
  
The sky is turning red  
  
Return to power draws near  
  
Fall into me, the sky's crimson tears  
  
Abolish the rules made of stone  
  
Pierced from below, souls of my treacherous past  
  
Betrayed by many, now ornaments dripping above  
  
Awaiting the hour of reprisal  
  
Your time slips away  
  
Raining blood  
  
From a lacerated sky  
  
Bleeding its horror  
  
Creating my structure  
  
Now I shall reign in blood  
  
Tori Amos, Raining Blood 


	2. Explication 2: The Color of Blood

Explication:  
  
Part Two: The Color of Blood  
  
Trapped in purgatory  
  
A lifeless object, alive  
  
Awaiting reprisal  
  
Death will be their acquisition  
  
The sky is turning red  
  
Return to power draws near  
  
Fall into me, the sky's crimson tears  
  
Abolish the rules made of stone  
  
Pierced from below, souls of my treacherous past  
  
Betrayed by many, now ornaments dripping above  
  
Awaiting the hour of reprisal  
  
Your time slips away  
  
Raining blood  
  
From a lacerated sky  
  
Bleeding its horror  
  
Creating my structure  
  
Now I shall reign in blood  
  
Tori Amos, Raining Blood  
  
  
  
1.1 These days it seemed to him more than ever that he was the one on the rack. Even if he didn't feel the ropes burning into his wrists, the worn lacerations with their red sore mouths over the pure skin there, tearing his arms out of their sockets with slow finality as his body was stretched past its limits. Even if he didn't feel the roller of spikes laid across the Portuguese rack, tearing the skin of his back and the countless needful array of muscles beneath to pieces like frayed hemp as she was pushed and pulled back and forth along the spikes in a psychotic game of tug-of-war. If it was she who was broken, screams muffled by the long ugly wagging tongue of the scold's bridle that stopped her mouth, it was he who felt truly tortured. As he watched, the beautiful crimson flow of the blood had ended its power to take all the endless suffering and ennui inside him away. It was a mechanical game.  
  
Even the taste, slippery over his fingers, the biting copper taste which had always held such power for sadistic pleasure meant nothing. He growled quietly, a deep dreadful sound carried up under his breath and trickling though parted lips slightly colored reddish, like the brick-red fall of his superfluous hair. With that growl, something broke, and wordlessly Duke Astaroth stalked out of his torture chamber.  
  
Why did nothing seem right or usual now that she was gone?  
  
His steps whispered on the stones- vinyl boots loosely laced up his long legs creaked a little. It was a curious collection of soft sounds that heralded his presence, when there were any at all. Previously, the hissing of a snake… but that was now over, wasn't it? He looked in the mirror, and the arcane mark of Lucifer's seal on his forehead had disappeared, giving the truth out to everyone like poisoned candy. Astaroth was alone in his own body.  
  
And if he had waited for this moment for centuries, millenia? If he had forced himself to despise her, when it was difficult and when it was easy? If he had tortured her in the only way it was possible for him to torture the twin sister trapped as he was himself in this pathetic body? If he had killed her chances for motherhood (such as they were or might have been) and denied her any contact with other beings?  
  
He hadn't ever really hated her. There was in his heart, only one 'her' and she had been the one. If there was love there, he wasn't aware. He didn't understand love himself, or care to understand it. If he had ever received love or felt it that was an unknown mystery among the countless unknown mysteries. In the experience of Astaroth, Duke of Terror, love was just another method of torture.  
  
He did the same things, in the same way, since she died- but it bored him. He had an inkling of this during Belial's distastrous "wedding party" when that tender little girl who he had let slip from him was rescued so messily by the Messiah and the Emperor of Hell's own monstrous son.  
  
Once, the only thing necessary for Astaroth's enjoyment of an event- and here we refer to the mad, spiteful enjoyment of the Furies of Hell,- was the sight of blood flowing. Blood had flown- even the hated Belial was laid momentarily low. But all the yelling, the theatrical mess, the uncontrolled frenzy- all of it had meant nothing to him. Less than nothing, it had bored him. He had left early, only to hear later the full account of events from Asmodeus. Needless to say, the Duke of Terror's interest in those events could have filled a thimble.  
  
Perhaps out of fear of losing one of his most potent allies, Asmodeus had begun sending tribute shortly after. Boys, girls, beings of great beauty and certain talent. Astaroth put them to the torture with as much real enthusiasm as a man attacking the same tasteless gruel he has been forced to eat for months in a row. He thought it helped a little- at first he always believed the blood flow, the beautiful crimson tide, and the methodical destruction of another living being would have the power to imbue him with ecstasy once more. But it was never enough. The great aching, empty hole that had been worn painfully into his spirit long ago now yawned open wider, able to be filled with nothing and healed by nothing.  
  
More and more he reminded himself of the witch in the fable, thought of finding some boy or girl with the power and will to torture him on his own devices. That would be a fitting end, like the punishment of Lucifer he had courted not long earlier. It would put an end to the pain he had always felt, the boredom he had always felt… which now was assuaged by nothing.  
  
But would Astaroth, cruelest and bloodiest warrior of the Seven Satans, truly let some powerless child best him so? The man in question, the jewel of fire veiled in silken hair the color of fresh blood, bent slightly over in the hallway and laughed the mad laugh of one who is not losing his mind quite fast enough.  
  
  
  
Falling through blackness, that sense of nausea and weightlessness, was beginning to seem commonplace to Vincent. He felt psychic- he knew exactly when he would hit bottom, but it did him little good. His feet caught, but slid on uneven ground littered with something and sent him sprawling to his back. Muscles pulled, and the sharp twinge in his ankle warned him he might have turned it under something. When eyes finally blinked free of irritating reactive watering, he could turn his head to look around.  
  
And feel a chill slide its way down his spine that had nothing at all to do with the icy air. This pit was filled with bones. The floor was covered with them- darkish from rot and in various states of decay. Some looked as though they had been gnawed by little teeth: Rats, his mind said and Vincent welcomed the thought. Getting to his feet, he thought with a hint of a smile that if this wasn't his subconscious mind's work, at least it belonged to a person with similar tastes in literature.  
  
I think we are in rat's alley, where the dead men lost their bones.  
  
His lips moved. He realized he was repeating the lines of the poem out loud, with a whisper of his normal voice, as he moved over the carpet of rather salt-stinking bones. That and the careful exactness of footwork, trying not to stumble again and perhaps more badly injure himself, were the only things keeping Vincent so calm, and he knew it. Even for a man used to dealing with dangerous men, even for a man who had seen other men killed at a very young age, such things as this were not normal or desirable. He didn't even think a man who had killed another could have stood this dark, rotting blanket of death.  
  
"What is that? What is the wind doing? Nothing again nothing."  
  
There were no exits to this place, and for a moment Vincent was stifled with the fear that he had dropped into a crevice from which he would never escape. He would starve to death, an ugly cruel death, and his flesh and bones would feed the damned rats.  
  
Then he saw something like a little crevice, no different from many except there was light behind it. He made his slow way over the skeletons and squeezed his way through it, rough and jagged abutments in the stone face scraping his bare skin.  
  
"Do you know nothing? Do you feel nothing? I know… those are pearls that were his eyes."  
  
The crevice was a long stretch like that, stifling and claustrophobic. The light only served to highlight the grotesque striped surface of rock, dripped with black lines that were probably mineral deposits left by the water line but looked like dried blood. The passage was certainly scraping up Vincent nicely, and tearing his robe. His feet had been torn so many times he kept wanting to pick them up and check for blood flow, but never quite did. Onward, onward.  
  
"I'm beginning to see what escargot feels like," he muttered to himself, a pathetic rich-man's homage to Die Hard. He had no idea how long this narrow fissure went on, but he did know there was light behind it, and so continued, pulling his torn robe off knobs of rock more and more every second. At last the fissure widened into a sort of antechamber, and that led off into a wide, broad hallway. The first signs of living beings he'd seen in this place were in that hall, in the form of tall braziers spilling out eerie red light and larger quantities of white smoke. The scent of the smoke was similar to incense, but of a type that choked and brought tears to the eyes like… pepper.  
  
He was facing away, staring at the braziers, and so he didn't see the other being in that long hallway until it was too late.  
  
  
  
Astaroth's head came up suddenly, with the finality of a striking snake. Under the straight fall of brick-red strands of hair, his dark eyes shimmered. The life force of another beat in this place, filling the braziers' smoke with the stranger pulses of his power. It didn't seem quite demonic, or yet quite human, but it held enough power to rouse the paranoia of one of the Satan's.  
  
When those amber ouroboros eyes found this creature- instantly, the starlight-blond hair and white chiton stood out in stark relief against the anguish-grey of the rock walls, Astaroth simply shot a blast of pure energy at his back. The young demon-human creature crumpled instantly, and stretched on the cold stone floor. 


End file.
